Good afternoon, this is the Chorus Call operator. Welcome to the presentation of the FY 2024 Results GPI Group. Let me remind you that all participants are in listen-only mode. If you need assistance from an operator, please click on the headphones icon bottom left of your screen. The floor goes now to Fabrizio Redavid. Please go ahead, Mr. Redavid.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day dedicated to the presentation of GPI Group 2024 Results. My name is Fabrizio Redavid. I'm the Marketing Director together with Investor Relations GPI Group. It's a pleasure for me to be here with the founder, Fausto Manzana, and the CEO, Matteo Santoro, General Director of our group, Lorenzo Giollo , Investor Relations. So let me share with you the agenda for this afternoon presentation. We have three bullets. Bullet number one with Mr. Manzana.
He will be talking about the performances of the process we have implemented to reach 2024, so we will also be talking about the growth we have had in terms of organic income and external lines, both in Italy and abroad, and there have been many different activities on the software industry, which is a strategic section for the digitalization of healthcare services. Bullet number two, Mr. Santoro will walk you through financials and economic details. He will also give us some color on the main activities. We will wrap up with a short summary of the key targets of the strategic industrial plan from 25 to 29 that we have presented on January 25. The last session will be managed by Lorenzo Giollo , so we will have a Q&A session. Once again, don't forget you can ask questions by clicking on the Q&A button.
I would like to thank all of you. Thank you so much for being here today, and without further ado, the floor goes to Mr. Manzana, CEO, for the GPI overview.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure for me to be here with you today after a while because actually two months ago we met for the presentation of our strategic plan, so today we are back and we are here to present you with the results of 2024. So as for 2024, I think we have reached most of our targets, so most of the targets we had, and today we can say we are the leading company in healthcare software in our country. We are one of the most important market operators in Europe, and we are now playing a significant role around the world.
This is what happens thanks to a major growth of our proceeds. From 2017 to 2024, the growth was around 17.17%. We also experienced a significant growth of profitability and EBITDA. Last year in 2024, we don't have specific M&A operations. We start having a general idea of the market today. We've carried out important investments between 2017 to 2024. There have been EUR 400 million worth of investment in M&A. We have also significantly improved EBITDA. EBITDA rate moved from 18.4% to 20.6%. This is a very important topic for us, and this is directly connected to all of the investments that we exclusively did on software programs. We also had a major growth of our proceeds in general. Today, proceeds account for 22% of our total turnover. As for software programs, one third of the proceeds comes from abroad.
So as for the approval of our 2025-2029 plan, we have just mentioned it. It includes growth. So we will have an internal endogenous growth, so the growth of our own income plus the restructuring of our organization. Today, we are well complex enough in order to further grow. So the time has come to build a new global dimension if we really want to continue along our journey to build a multinational company in the IT healthcare systems. So in our plan, we also have growth versus what is happening abroad, and there's also a significant growth of the EBITDA rate. So in order to support this very plan, we have also issued two bonds, mini bonds, I should say, a bullet bond and another bond. And this is going to support our growth journey.
Now, for us, this is absolutely unavoidable because, again, one of the key topics for the future would be the fact of working at best on cash flows. So basically, we confirm what we've been repeating over and over. So we've been commenting this slide for quite a long time. So you can see here the context that we are experiencing these days. I have to say that what we are doing is so important, so significant, not just for our country, but also in a comprehensive general way. So we need to remember ethics and then another key concept, which is responsibility. We care for people, and of course, we put passion in what we do, and this is one of the key drivers of our results.
So every single company and every single project is important and significant for us, but it is difficult, I mean, to imagine such an exciting journey. So we are very close, if you will, to the quality of life of patients or customers. So basically, we are helping those who help the sick and patients. So we are, if you will, the closest to caregivers. So this is a growth journey or a growth pathway that you can see here. You can see here that our CAGR is definitely significant, I mean, in terms of revenues, but also in terms of EBITDA. Now, you can see here that EBITDA was in growth. So as you can see here, it is absolutely significant because it was 24%. It will be 27%. So this is a strong acceleration. Of course, we will see the results in the next quarters also.
Now, the delivery plus the go-live will turn into a huge quantity of projects having to do with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. We have acquired TESI and Evolucare. So this is based on our products. So this is a typical business of GPI, and all of this has brought about massive results. So we will continue on both pathways. So we want to be product-centric. Of course, products will support us around the world, but also in Italy, in our country. So we want to be as close as possible to our customers so we will be able to help them. So this is the general footprint. So we start having significant businesses in many European countries. So thanks to Evolucare, we now have a growth and development plan in the French-speaking area, but also in North Africa. So this is a significant development for the future.
Basically, growth will come from our products. We will further invest. We will strengthen our commercial network. Now, for me personally, this is a significant topic, the fact of being able to have the right combination between products on the one side and projects and services on the other. So this is one of the key differentiators we can take advantage of, and we can have a wonderful relationship with our customers. Now, as far as Italy is concerned, we can cover the entire country. So we have 50 offices around the country. And we don't want to reduce this number because we believe in being very close, as close as possible to our customers. So in our opinion, this will make the difference. So today, we have 18 offices around the globe. So our global presence is becoming stronger and stronger.
From 2021 to 2024, as I said before, we have reconfirmed our leadership position in our country in terms of healthcare software and the healthcare BPO markets. Now, as for the healthcare software, we have a so-called operating hub. So we will create a new idea, and the name is Virtual Care. So there will be less booking business. But of course, we will be able to use these resources for tele-monitoring and for, I mean, taking out the challenge of the control business. Our General Director will be speaking about this in a couple of minutes. Now, in this slide, you can see something, in my opinion, quite interesting because some people say 50, some people say 60 billion euros. Of course, this seems to be the global market size, and the growth is interesting of this market, which is between 8% and 10%.
This is the area that we can cater for, I mean, countries where we do have our business as of today. We have plans in France, as I said before, DACH, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the USA, and of course, our own country, Italy, so in our opinion, these growth rates are very significant, and this won't change after the end of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Of course, we need to keep investing on IT systems so that the entire ecosystem will be sustainable. I'd like to remind you that with the EUR 0.5 billion income, this is basically a little bit more than 1% of the total value of the market, so if you consider the addressable target, I mean, the one we can address directly, the percent rate becomes even more interesting. Of course, we need to continue with our growth pathway within products.
I wish to highlight all the opportunities we have in the rest of the world. So as you can see in this table, well, you have different areas. If you put them together, you can see all of our offering. We will offer horizontal solutions, for example, EHR, EMR, the administration, management, treatment, care. So in general, if you will, this is the core business that we manage today. We would like to increase our margins, for example, selling licenses. And I'm sure we will be pervasive around the world in terms of blood, diagnostics, and CC or critical care. So as for blood, we are now operating in 70 countries. So we have the LIS business in more than 20 countries around the world, laboratory information systems or LIS. Once again, we will keep investing on the commercial network so as to reach our targets.
In our opinion, this will be the real future. Care, tele-monitoring. What we imagine is an evolution of our main hub. We will turn it into a tele-monitoring hub in order to help and support patients or customers instead of supporting the pathology. We cannot forget ICT and cyber defense. Now, cyber defense is a big investment. It has just started becoming productive, and it's a key need that we have. This need will turn into an opportunity concerning all of our customers. Every single complex organization deserves a high level of attention in terms of cyber defense or cyber security. We will do the same with automation.
Of course, I'm talking about the pharma world together with the production of IV therapies where we have invested last year for the design and the start of a project having to do with robots taking care of IV or infusions. So we would like to keep going so we have a general comprehensive vision. So this is our world. This is an industry we know very well. Well, of course, there are some areas with high margins, other areas where the margin level is a little bit smaller. But what is important is that this is our future. So this is what we would like to do. Now, first of all, we would like to strengthen our presence and business in our country. As for software programs, well, we have hundreds of projects coming to light right now.
I'm sure that in the near future, we will be able to reconfirm this strong presence on the market. We also would like to see the fruits of the recent investments made in products. So in many different countries, we have a leading position in blood and diagnostics. We would like to continue this positive trend. There are many different countries where you have tenders or national tenders. Once again, we do take part in the tenders, and they include hundreds of installations in hundreds of hospitals. So, of course, we need partners, local partners for those complex contexts. Especially in the year just begun, so in 2025, we will have a new organization based on different geographical areas and solutions. This means that we will have significant savings.
As you must have seen in the strategic plan presentation, we will work on cost reduction by centralizing some functions and by better managing complexity. We also think we will be able to capture value from the diversification of our businesses. So telemedicine, and as I said before, the transformation of BPO into Virtual Care, cyber security that I have just mentioned, plus automation. We think that these four areas in the future will give us the possibility to grow. So in 2025, we think we will be able to reconfirm our growth trend, which is what we have experienced in the recent past. And this both in terms of revenue streams, but also in terms of EBITDA. So we do think that this kind of journey will give us the possibility to reach important targets in 2027, so exceeding EUR 600 million EBITDA.
In this case, the increase would be 22%, up to EUR 750 million that we forecast in 2029. And in that case, EBITDA would be 25%. So there have been some acquisitions, and there may be some very, very small adjustments, but we do not plan any investment in M&A operations. So once again, this is why I keep saying that this will be internal or organic growth. Okay, this is it with my presentation. May I ask the General Manager, Mr. Santoro, to take over?
Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Matteo Santoro, GM of the group. It's a pleasure for me to be here with you today because we can share with you all what we are doing. So I have some numbers I'd like to share with you. Sometimes our business is kind of difficult to understand.
We are here to give you information so that you can really understand what we do. Now, our manager and director shared with you an overview of 2024, but he also added some perspectives. I mean, he also mentioned the evolution and the new developments of the group. The market awaiting us is a global market. 2024 closed with these conditions. Per se, 2024 has already launched the foundations of the new industrial plan. We are here. This is a global market. Healthcare is directly related to the economic performances of every single country. COVID-19 has shown us many behaviors, many things. The sectors in which we are investing are the right sectors because healthcare is the number one priority in every single country's agendas. Funds may be public or private or hybrid.
Anyway, we are striving to make sure everyone can benefit from healthcare services, but in some cases, these systems are no longer sustainable. Our economies know that healthcare or health in general is a fundamental strategic sector. 2024 has been, let's say, a sparkling, difficult year, but we closed it being very satisfied and very happy. So we had to manage many different situations. We had to manage the impact of the new ways to manage tenders. So tenders have been centralized. So here in Italy, we now have Consip, just the single unique provisioning hub. So there's been higher complexity, if you will, but at the same time, we had to change the way we work. So we've been able to generate efficiencies. 2024 was the year where we have conceptualized our industrial plan. So we could see it, let's say, being operated.
In 2024, we have done many things, and let me talk briefly about the business carried out. We are managing contracts with our customers with a high level of reputation, so we are one of the most credible operators or players on the market. We have never seen any contract termination. What we see is extensions, so we've taken advantage of 2024's business in order to strengthen our offer. The offering is now stronger, wider, and we also decided to work a lot on product innovation, moving on so-called frontier products where software programs are more and more important today. In this case, we collaborate with epidemiologists, physicians, and many other specialties in the healthcare sector, so based on this agenda, you can see that GPI is a leading player in digital healthcare, strong expansion internationally. Our solutions are top-notch, top-quality solutions.
Most of them are considered medical devices, so they are MDR certified in compliance with European regulations. We grow on a double-digit basis, and especially there's been top growth in terms of software programs. And we perform quite well. Out of 111 tenders, we were awarded 44. So the business volume has been sky-high. So today, we want to create the future of this company based on these foundations. So once again, software programs and definitely a global market. So we closed 2024 with around EUR 509.9 million. This is our revenue and other income. The growth was 17.7%. So out of this share, EUR 304.1 million have to do with software programs. Growth was organic, but more than 10%. The inorganic part concerns the impact of Evolucare, which is the company we've taken over. Back in 2024, its impact was 12 months versus some months only in 2023.
So versus 2023, where we have EUR 336 million, there's a big growth, which is due to software. EBITDA is EUR 104.8 million, a little bit higher than our objective. So the growth of EBITDA is 31.3%. The margin is 20.6%. And once again, the growth of EBITDA was partly represented by organic growth, 14.6%, and inorganic growth by 16.8%. Once again, I'm talking about the positive impact of Evolucare. We've been able to increase the efficiency and effectiveness in terms of labor costs. They went down by 1.9%. And the growth of proceeds increased less than proportionately the staff costs. So our EBITDA goes up by 35%. EBIT is around EUR 36.7 million, plus 43.4%. If you consider D&A, we have around EUR 53.7 million.
This means that we have a net income from our continuing ordinary operations around EUR 14.6 million versus 2023, where we were negative by EUR 0.6 million. Total net income, in this case, we have the capital gain of our Argentea. This is EUR 103.4 million. As for the net interest expenses, the impact was negative by EUR 14.4 million. So there's an improvement by EUR 4.8 million versus last year. And of course, taxes go up because net profits go up as well. The board of directors, when approving the balance sheet, proposes to pay out EUR 0.5 dividend per share. I think that this slide is quite interesting because it shows you that the company is focusing on solutions concerning software programs. You can see the difference between 2023 and 2024. We now have EUR 304 million concerning software. So plus EUR 77 million. This is a very important piece of information.
We are enjoying an organic growth. So 19% of EUR 77 million is due to organic growth. And we also have to consider the impact of Evolucare, that this year we'll be performing on 12 months out of 12. So plus EUR 24 million EBITDA. The percent rate is a little bit higher than the growth of income. So in the composition of the entire business volumes, software accounts for 60%, while a couple of years ago, it was below 40%. So once again, this is the current trend that we are taking advantage of. And this is exactly in compliance with our strategic plan. You can see here, 86% of EBITDA being composed by software-related proceeds. Retention is 96%. The tender-win ratio is 44%. Now, this means that almost one tenth out of two is awarded to us.
Right now, the income composition is represented in the following ways: 79% public customers, 21% private customers. Now, Italy has a major impact on this percent rate. You know that our customer portfolio is represented by many public customers. Let me share with you the breakdown of our proceeds. So we have created this slide, I mean, to make sure you understand a little better our offering. Of course, I'm talking about software only. And one of the key points of our offer is that you can see here many different clusters. So you can see how we are advancing our industrial plan. The first point is hospital information systems, HIS. So these are those products and/or solutions giving you the possibility to manage the patient, I mean, from the in to the out, let's say, moment.
So we have a huge ecosystem of products: clinical reports, software programs for bookings. So in this case, there are deeply, if you will, clinical and administrative products. So these proceeds come from Italy, France, and DACH, D-A-C-H: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We have a company based or headquartered in Austria. So this part, the proceeds, account for 39% of total volume, as you can see here in the pie chart. Then we have blood. Now, when we talk about blood, I'm talking about solutions and/or products that give us the possibility to manage logistics, but also the clinic aspect of the blood transfer process from donation to storage to transfusion. So we are one of the top four players in the world. We have invested a lot. We have plenty of solutions, plenty of platforms. We closed with satisfactory results. 12.5% of proceeds comes from blood.
There will be new solutions to be integrated in the future. We can count on excellent platforms coming from France and Spain. So we now work to create synergies because the real topic for the next year or so is that growth will depend heavily on synergies. We also have diagnostics products. This is due to TESI, an Italian company that we've taken over recently. They also have subsidiaries in Mexico and in South America. So we're talking about diagnostics. I'm talking about the laboratory information systems or LIS. This means you can integrate the information coming from all the equipment generating data. We have imaging. So in this case, I'm talking about the management of clinical imaging. So in this case, Evolucare is playing a vital role and pathology. So this is on high demand in our sector.
Pathologists will analyze data, and they come up with a diagnosis. It's very difficult to find pathologists today. Thanks to these solutions, we can digitize the tests and the samples so that there are no space or time constraints. This can be assessed by experts around the world on remote solutions. With AI, we are able to increase productivity. We set aside the tests and the samples we are not interested in. We improve the life of the anatomopathologist. These products can be internationally scaled. They are scalable in Italy and abroad. In the treating and caring cluster, we can find those products that, in a way, aim, well, maybe not just at taking care of a symptom, but here we take care of the entire person. Social care, this means we have to manage local services, integrated home service.
We also have our own platform. The name is exactly Telemedicine. Now, that was a national tender, and we are the winners, so we will be talking soon about the first installations done in many different Italian regions, and the proceeds here will be around EUR 50 million. This is a platform that gives us the possibility to carry out all of those activities, giving us the possibility to do the take-up of the patient. The name of the platform is POHEMA. It is internationally scalable, then we have managing, so in this case, I'm talking about the administrative systems in order to manage our balance sheets, so 30% of balance sheets in Italy is drafted thanks to our own administrative solutions. We also have HR solutions. We use 40% of the payslips of all the healthcare-related organizations, around 450 public bodies. Every single month, we produce around 550,000 payslips.
We also have decision-making support systems. We also have critical care. It accounts for 3% of our income, but we think this is one of the best and fastest-growing product solutions. So this is to manage activities and workflows that come to an end inside an operating theater or anesthesia or resuscitation. So this is included in Evolucare. But of course, we are also working on synergies, and we are selling these solutions in Italy as well. We also have many other products, many services that we offer to the public administration. Anyway, to cut the story short, the total breakdown of proceeds is represented by product clusters on which our CEO a couple of minutes ago talked about, and he told us how we want to continue. So EUR 304 million proceeds. You can see here the divisions. So we have Care.
Care has always been an area quite difficult to make sure people understood it because there are investments, and of course, this is based on plenty of synergies thanks to our own technologies. There are no risks in terms of staff because in this business, you don't have many employees, so in this case, there are specific provisions to protect jobs, so we don't have the risk to manage staff, so 2024 was quite flat, stable, from EUR 164 million to EUR 162 million, but we have improved the margin level. In 2024, we focused on those companies where we can massively use the technology because the real topic is to automate all of what the machine can do. Care works just like an operating hub or operating central. Telemonitoring, for example, will represent the new healthcare services management style in the future because it will allow savings.
We are talking with some regional authorities, and they are interested in creating telemonitoring hubs. So care is doing this. So it takes care of the administrative management, so protection, payment. So we also would like to add counseling, nursing, so in order to take up chronic patients. This is the big challenge. Today, chronic patients require 85% of the turnover, if you will, or the expenditure. So we also have income coming from the island of Malta, where we do telemonitoring on diabetes patients, chronic patients from zero to 18 years of age. And so once again, the customer pays us on a patient basis. This is basically a commodity. So the margin is more than 50%. Retention is 93%. Basically, we win one tender out of three. In some cases, these durations are a little bit longer than this.
So we are shifting from we are getting to 18%. Very good. So basically, in 2024, we have Italy being a leader. We are present in all territories. We manage 70% of solutions. In 2024, we have acted without criticalities. We have small contracts, but also very important contracts, like with the Lombardia Region. Some contracts include 10 million Italians. We have awarded the national tender for telemedicine with a total value of approximately EUR 300 million. So for Italy, the thing is that we are not saturated. We are growing in the AI sector, and we should be able to add value to our resources. We have closed 2024 with satisfaction, but we know that we can occupy larger market shares thanks to synergies in the future. Next slide.
As I was saying at the beginning, in the last year specifically, we have worked on enhancing our offer, trying to find new state-of-the-art solutions. We also have new elements to add to new solutions. We have included some of them here, some of the main ones, and with these applications that require new skills, new capabilities, we can evaluate managed crisis. In the first one, Gpi4AI , we have voice. Voice is the only part of the human body that we can save and that doesn't deteriorate over time. From voice, the voice we can have diagnosis for diseases or mental health diseases, so the first application that is really undergoing, we have this AI agent included into our platform to perform speech emotion, and we are able to diagnose postpartum depression just from the sound of the voice.
So the system is able to diagnose this condition with very high precision. We also have decision-making support through AI, for example, in order to draft and design a waiting list. You know that now access to healthcare is a real problem in some areas of Italy, and not only Italy. So these AI agents allow us having greater efficiency on possible waiting queues, waiting line scenarios, so as to improve and enhance access to healthcare for citizens. We also have predictive agents. We are investing a lot on One Health, which is an approach to health that understands health as a comprehensive figure that is influenced by the environment, the diet, etc. So through these different applications, we are able to help hospitals in having some information about future admissions in the hospital when these are related to environmental factors.
This is very useful because it's related to respiratory diseases, heart diseases. Imagine how important this could be for us and for the final user, so this agent is able to organize and plan the activity of the hospital, and then we have the generative part, which is the one that allows the integration of data banks to leverage knowledge base in order to ask or to query the data bank and have final solutions and answers thanks to the use of artificial intelligence. Okay, let's talk about foreign countries. As far as foreign countries are concerned, we can say that in 2024, growth was very strong. Compared to the previous year, we have a growth of 44% year on year. We have EUR 110 million, 33% of which of software's total revenues. Of these EUR 100 million, EUR 71 million come from products in the areas of France, Spain, and DACH.
And EUR 29 million are from extra-EU revenues, mainly Mexico, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia. So foreign countries are for us a great opportunity. Next slide, please. Okay, let's get to the financial highlights for 2024. We have fixed assets of EUR 453 million. Working capital is increasing due to the increase in trade receivables and contract assets. And we have an increased trade payables and accounts receivables amounting to EUR 20 million. We have shareholder equity higher than revised for the financial year 2023, EUR 76.4 million increase, which is largely driven by 2024 net income, net of dividends. We have a rating of A3.1 equivalent to A. We also have a bridge in our debt. So starting from the initial value registered in January 2024, we have an improvement of EUR 104 million EBITDA-related improvement, then EUR 54 million with an increase of the working capital.
EUR 51 million is CapEx, tangible investments, clinic in Basilicata, etc. Some intangible for software development, EUR 24.5 million in dividends. We have some financial costs of EUR 20 million in taxes to get to a final position of EUR 323 million. Net financial position is EUR 226 million. Next slide, please. So basically, our objective is to improve the competitive position in Europe for software. And this will happen through the integration of acquisitions. We'll have very important synergies. They will be supported by a revision of our operating model through which we expect to have more synergies through cross-selling synergy in the industrial sector because we'll be able to centralize the incidence of costs of our platforms. But the main objective is to generate cash flow to improve our debt/EBITDA ratio, which is one of the main objectives for our future.
In the first forecast for 2025, our position seems to be improving. Next slide, please. As I was saying earlier, the plan for 24-25, the main target strategic business plan 25-29, you find them here in this slide. We have revenue in 2029, which is way higher than EUR 700 million, with the CapEx between 7%-9% of revenue, a figure of ROIC higher than 15%, getting to a stable distribution of dividends. The objective will be to have an NFP EBITDA ratio with a value lower than 2.7x. This should be everything. I've added some concrete values to my speech and my slides in order to give you an overview of the situation. Thank you very much for your attention. Let's now switch to the Q&A session.
We have some questions. On the left bar, you can ask questions clicking on the Q&A button and texting. We have two questions. They ask regarding automation, if you're able to provide more details for the future development, and if you can consider a spin-off. Also, in terms of three minor business areas, if there will be a high single-digit increase for the software part, for the cap division, what are your expectations?
Matteo, maybe you want to answer this.
Okay, I'll try and summarize. The first one is related to a spin-off of automation if there are some development plans. The plan doesn't imply spin-off operations. This is not excluded, of course. We have identified an opportunity area in automation. We are investing on high-technology products, for example, for a company in Thailand. These are very high-quality, high-standard drug production. We're investing in that.
We haven't thought about a spin-off, but we are convinced that this could be a growth area for us, then in the future, of course, we don't know what's going to happen, and we'll see in the future if this area will be beneficial, but we are investing in that, and then about the software part, if a 10% growth is expected, what are the expectations for the area? Well, for software in our plan, we based ourselves on the basic line projections. We have developed scenarios, worst-case scenarios, best-case scenarios. In the past, we have seen our companies growing. So we're setting ourselves on data slightly over market values because thanks to the acquisitions that we've done in recent years, we require a more structured approach that we believe could enhance synergies so that we can grow inertially almost. So we'll be growth higher than the market.
As far as care is concerned, that part of the industrial plan that we've called the opportunities, diversification, care for us is strategic. It doesn't really produce huge margins but allows us to develop strategic business models. So we are working on public and private partnerships on medium-term and long-term in collaboration with some regions. And software will help us in this, and it will allow us having profitability in the future. For others, system security is crucial right now. So future investments will have to include that we are expecting growth on that. And also on automation, we are investing because we believe that we can get to newer opportunities. The common guidelines of the group will be based on software anyways, despite the concept being wider than in the past.
There are two questions now for Fausto.
Is there a reason why dividends will be paid in July rather than May? And I have a second question here. What is the strategy for the U.S., especially taking into consideration the new administration?
Well, no, there is not a real or specific reason why dividends will be distributed in July. We just want to separate the extraordinary dividend distribution. As far as the United States are concerned, we believe that we have a coherent, consistent approach. GPI USA has been there for a few years, and we believe that being rooted in Houston will be able to get to positive results. We will be pursuing our objectives. The United States accounts for 50% of the health and care market, so this is a very profitable and very interesting market for us.
But the area in which we operate, we don't have huge competitors. So we're able to offer to major hospitals on both coasts in the U.S. important software and solutions. So we believe that we can be successful in the United States, also considering the new policies of President Trump. So this is an interesting area for us. Thank you.
There are no other questions, so we are very much on time. We'll be wrapping up today's meeting. Actually, we have one last question. I'll read it to you very quickly. Can we have some more details about the cyber defense area? And what is the impact of it and the expected growth rate? So just to give an overview of the cyber defense area.
Well, we have started from a need that of having a presence in the sector.
So we have GPI Cyberdefence, and we've imagined to take up an opportunity there. We now believe that the quality of the service that we are able to offer is very strong and very important so that we can deal with the security problems and issues of our clients. There is a very high marginality there. So we can just need to check the balance of GPI Cyberdefence growth will be very significant. And that is why we believe that these sectors are high-potential sectors as we've defined them. We have marginalities that are well above 50% and growth rate of three to four times current values.
Very good. Okay, so we don't have any other question. You have our contacts if you want to ask other questions.
Thank you very much for joining our meeting, and we hope to see you next time with better and improved results. Thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your day.